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The 9th Commandment tells us to be truth-tellers. Here are ten truths about lies.

The 8th Commandment is really simple: “Don’t steal.” As everyone knows, stealing is taking what doesn't belong to you. So, what's interesting about the 8th Commandment is that it implies that some things belong to me and some things don't belong to me.

Hence my question: “Which things are mine, and which things aren't?”

If you live your life trying to have control over the things that aren’t yours, you will be miserable and make other people miserable.

Let's take ownership over the things that belong to us, and let go of everything else.

This week in our Ten Commandments series, my wife joined me for our discussion about the 7th Commandment, the adultery one. But rather than just talking about adultery, we talked marriage more broadly. What makes a strong marriage?

The reason this discussion is for everyone is because when marriages are strong everybody wins.

Now, we don’t claim to be experts on marriage. In fact, we call ourselves The Unexperts. But, we shared some of what we’ve learned in hopes that it will help someone somewhere.

What If We Really Believed the Holy Spirit Could Transform Anyone's Heart?

For many of us, our lack of faith is not a failure to trust Jesus with our lives or a failure to believe he raises the dead.

No, for many of us our lack of faith is in believing that other people can change.

And yet, Pentecost is proof that the Holy Spirit can transform *anyone’s* heart!

In Ezekiel’s great vision of the valley of dry bones, even what seems impossible can come to pass because of the work of the Holy Spirit.

What if we lived and prayed and hoped as if we actually believed it?!

What does it mean to honor your father and your mother?

At the very least, it means to be grateful that the Lord used them to give you life. Procreation is a partnership with the Lord; obviously, a man and a woman have to come together for there to be conception, but it’s God who makes life possible. The Lord has delegated power to fathers and mothers to make procreation possible. So, every human life is a product of what the Bible calls the “one flesh” union between a father and a mother. There are no people who do not have both a biological father and a biological mother.

Now, many people don’t know their biological parents for many reasons, and many other people had parents who were abusive or even evil. And yet, the basic fact is the same: none of us would be here were it not for our parents (and their parents, and their parents, etc.).

So, honoring your father and mother must always start with gratitude that the Lord used them to give your life. It can be more than that, but it’s not less. And gratitude is always a good place to start.

P.S. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus (Ephesians 6:2-3), this is the first commandment with a promise. Do this, and things will go well for you.

On the face of it, the utility of the Sabbath Command seems relatively obvious: it’s good to take a weekly day of rest. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That kind of thing.

But I think that’s exactly backwards—I’m convinced that thinking of the sabbath day as a day of rest is missing the point.

Of all the commandments, maybe the Sabbath Command is the one that we ignore the most, which means for us in our day, it might be the most misunderstood and the most important.

Here’s the key to understanding Commandment #4:

Sabbath means “stop.”

Let’s talk about it.